ICL comes back bigger & better

It was simply bigger and better. It had all the ingredients to make it a perfect hit. A new team and venue was added to the tournament and the spectators flocked to the grounds. Ahmedabad’s Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel Stadium, the latest addition to the venues, was packed with over 60,000 fans for the final between Lahore Badshahs and Hyderabad Heroes. Debutant team Dhaka Warriors gave ICL its’ the first ever centurion in Alok Kapali.

The best of the ICL came during the final leg. In the best-of-three final, one game saw a spectacular catch from Justin Kemp — the South African diving backwards, clutching the ball centimetres off the boundary with one hand — that turned the game in Heroes favour. Next game it got better as a murderous Imran Nazir hit an unbeaten 111, studded with 11 sixes and 7 boundaries and registering every existing ICL batting record to his name.

This gave Badshahs hand on the winning bounty of Rs2 crore, Heroes laid hands on Rs1 crore. The ripple effect of this was that viewership ratings of the tournament went up in overseas market. Pakistan registered 5.7 and UK got a high 1.4 among Asian population.